This article was posted on the site of the British online journal Unherd, which has a lot of interesting content, and is far from ideologically homogeneous, with views ranging from leftist to conservative traditionalists and points in between. The key parallels are the need to assert the existence of an existential threat, warranting extreme measures, in the present case the need for a struggle of Manichean proportions.
This view reminds me of a talk given to the Blackheath Philosophy Forum on the eve of the Iraq invasion by Owen Harries, former editor of National Interest magazine and a doyen of the Realist school of international relations. Harries noted the origins of the neo-con movement actually originated in the left, at least those "mugged by reality", and argued that they had imported what he saw as the left-wing mindset, which includes the sense that social reality can be engineered rather than being the result of organic evolution.
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Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.
Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.